Truck Drivers Replaced by Self-Driving Trucks?
Posted on May 24, 2015
Filed Under GENERAL
I ran across this blog this morning about self-driving trucks, and the elimination of truck drivers. It is thought provoking. At this point in my life, I like anything which makes me think, which eliminates 98% of all TV shows. The author’s premise is that self-driving trucks will hit the roads in the next 10 years, and shortly thereafter, will replace all truck drivers. Furthermore, he points out that truck driving, and the people who support and assist the trucking industry (like me, I guess), are all going be unemployed, and how are we going to deal all these unemployed people? I think his conclusion is that all the unemployed truck drivers, as well as everyone else, needs to be given a basic income.
I probably do not agree with him about the basic income part, as he does not say where that’s coming from… I assume it’s coming from everyone else who has a job. Furthermore, don’t we already do that, in the form of welfare, job re-training programs, etc.?
As far as the self-driving trucks goes, that is the thought-provoking part. This technology is definitely coming, and the blog does a good job of laying out some basic details and timelines. He quotes Morgan Stanley, a too-big-to-fail investment bank, which guesses that by 2022, a completely self-driving car and truck will be here. It further guesses that in 2026 these vehicles will start replacing the self-driving vehicles, and by 2046, self-driving vehicles will be gone.
The blog author is correct in stating that self-driving vehicles will happen faster for trucks than cars. For one thing, I’m not giving up my self-driving car. Of course, by 2046, I’ll be 78 years old, and I may desire the convenience and security of a self-driving car, as I won’t be able to keep up with all the young whippersnappers zooming by me. Probably not, I really hate the idea of being driven by a self-driving car.
Self-driving trucks, though, will be incredibly popular. There is just no way a human-driven truck can complete with a computer-driven truck. Compared to a human truck driver, the computer truck will be much cheaper to operate, possibly many times cheaper. Furthermore, the computer truck can just keep running, stopping only for fuel and maintenance. No more running out of hours. I believe that truck drivers will still be needed, but in only a fraction of the numbers we have today. The driver would basically exist as a computer repair technician, mechanic, and driver, all rolled into one. Whenever a computer truck breaks, you would call out the repair technician/driver to rescue the load.
One unknown is how safe these vehicles will be. Everyone in the technology sector assumes they will be much safer than human-driven trucks. I’m not so sure. How often will the computer break? I have a computer, and it breaks all the time. It freezes, locks up, drops the wireless signal, does little inexplicable things, which I then have to fix. When these sort of things happen in the computer truck, what will happen? The blogger says these trucks are designed to slow down, and pull off the road when they computer senses it needs help. Well, we’ll see, I’m not so sure.
Also, I don’t know how forgiving the public at large will be when a computer truck has a wreck. It is definitely going to happen; as I said computers break all the time. When a human truck rear-ends a line of cars and kills 4, we put the driver in jail, and sue the trucking company. When a computer truck does that, who are we going to put in jail? Are we going to sue Apple? I guess it will basically come down to how often it happens. If it happens one tenth as often as the human trucks crash, we’ll probably just mark it up to “nothing’s perfect”, and accept it, because the number of lives saved over human trucks will be undeniable.
I believe these timelines are probably way optimistic. Everything always takes twice as long as you think it’s going to take. I have no empirical evidence to support that. It’s just something I have observed. For example, look at movies which speculate about future technologies. In “Back to the Future II”, which was set in 2015, they had flying cars, and Mr. Fusion, which generated 1.21 gigawatts of power from banana peels and beer. I just checked outside my front door, and in my 2015, I see neither.
Someday, truck drivers will be largely eliminated, but I think this will not start to happen until 2030, at the earliest. Who knows, maybe they will invent a Star Trek-type transporter first, which will eliminate the need for all types of trucks, computer-driven, or otherwise.
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